Information Consumption and Corporate Financialization: Evidence from China’s Information Consumption Pilot Policy

Whether information consumption guides firms back to their core businesses or instead exacerbates corporate financialization remains empirically underexplored. We use panel data of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2009 to 2024. We take China’s Information Consumption Pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employ a staggered difference-in-differences approach to examine the impact of information consumption on corporate financialization. The findings show that information consumption significantly promotes corporate financialization, with the precautionary motive driving financialization more strongly than the profit-seeking motive. Mechanism tests reveal that information consumption drives corporate financialization by easing financing constraints and improving investment efficiency, while internal corporate governance and external economic policy uncertainty play significant moderating roles. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the exacerbating effect of information consumption on corporate financialization is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises, small-scale firms, non-high-tech industries, and regions with a low level of financial development. Further analysis shows that information consumption not only exacerbates excessive corporate financialization but also triggers peer effects in financialization. Moreover, the financialization induced by information consumption suppresses long-term corporate performance growth. These findings uncover the micro-mechanisms through which information consumption reshapes corporate capital allocation decisions, offering practical implications for refining information consumption policies and channeling financial resources back to the real economy.